Through the efforts of many people, searching for, and finding orphaned files left over from the reduction from Knoppix, we managed to find about half a meg of new space to play with.
And this is good.
The powers that be have deeded this space for the newly created DSL default theme, and various other eye candy.
While I understand their goals of making DSL "presentable" for our 1.0 debut, making the DSL desktop "unified" or whatever. I also find this use of space a little disappointing.
Am I the only one who feels that this space could be better used to squeeze more functionality out of our little 50mb monster?
There are still a few things that I feel we need to complete the goal of "a full OS in 50mb".
We have no command-line mail app (Pine, Elm, Mutt, etc) for the easy retrieval of mail for people who don't use X (and we have a lot of them).
I know we have Exim, which is a tiny app, much like sendmail, but Exim is clunky, and annoying and inconvinient for everyday use.
The gpm (general purpose mouse) would be another great benefit for those X-impaired users. It allows the mouse to be used in runlevel 2, for things like web browsing with Links, and copying and pasting. It's really nice to have!
Many users have called for a MSN client for DSL base, and tmsn is VERY small, and curses based.
I know that the aforementioned 500k or so cannot do all of this, but it could do 2 out of the 3.
But I'll admit that I'm a follower of the literal meaning of the saying "Form follows function", meaning that I think that function should take priority over looking good.
And, I do feel that DSL should get a nice facelift for the release of 1.0, I just feel that it ought to fit into the "damn small" mindset, and take up as little space as possible.
:\
-J.P.